Letters to the Editor
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Amsterdam
When I went to Amsterdam, the biggest crime I heard about was bicycle theft.
Pretty telling statement in a city where pretty much anything goes. See kids, the War on Drugs is a good thing....
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Not Transportation?
If the Bush administration thinks biking isn't true transportation than they need to come to my house. I own a bike and commute to work 5 days a week. I live in town so I can bike easily to any store I need to go to without using my car. My town has been putting in bike lanes in the busier streets, which have opened up my biking range even more. In the past 10 years that I've been biking to work I've noticed an increase in other commuters biking to work. The Bush administration has had their head in the sand since the moment they came into office.
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republikan logic
ketchup is a vegetable and bicycles are not transportation. There's your modern fascist domestic agenda. Idiots.
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Bike trails as transportation infrastructure
Of course bike trails are transportation infrastructure.
Every bike on the road is one less car contributing to gridlock. There's benefit number one. However, cars and bikes move at different speeds. To the extent that the bicycles can be removed from the flow of faster-moving car traffic, the car traffic is thereby improved. Benefit number two.
Having said that, it is important to make the bike trail system something that actually gets bicyclists efficiently to all parts of the city -- not simply recreational trails.
I commute on a bike every workday, down a major traffic artery in my district. The pavement is in horrible shape and the drivers are dangerous. Sometimes I have to ride right in the middle of the lane to avoid hazards like potholes, broken glass, and suddenly opened car doors. (The vehicle code in my state is quite clear that this is legal and acceptable.) A bike thoroughfare paralleling the main road (perhaps one street over) would solve a whole lot of problems caused by the interaction of bicycle and auto traffic. Making the bike commute more pleasant and safe also might cause a few more drivers to get out of their cars and onto their bikes. See Benefit Number One, above.
Simply discouraging biking solves nothing.
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Critical Mass
Ride with Critical Mass. You will quickly see how cyclists are treated on a local level by law enforcement, city planners, legislators etc... Now that anti-cycling is top down government policy I would expect the conditions to degenerate even more.
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It's the lanes, not the density
I live in Minneapolis, and I bicycle to work now while I work downtown. I drive when I work in suburbs. I've also biked, or tried to, in St. Paul, Chicago, and Houston. Minneapolitans bike more not because we're particularly virtuous, smart, athletic, or too poor to afford cars. The city has made lanes and paths over much of the city, more than any other city so far as I know. St. Paul does pretty good in this regard, as does Chicago. Houston's idea of a bike lane was two feet wide for a couple blocks here and there, or even a car lane marked for bikes too. The more lanes, the more riders. My experience of suburbs are that bike lanes are restricted to paths in parks, and street are generally curb to curb cars, making bicycling dangerous. Even with heat and cold, bike use is mostly a function of the availability of safe and convenient routes.
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Biking is OK, but it's Not
Tinmaniac and Slosh,
Running down a pedestrian is not cool! I always stop or go behind pedestrians, because I remember they are even more defenseless than bikers. I walk too. However, to go from there to say, well, act like a car at all times, you are a 'car'. Not true. Cars and bicycles are not the same.
It seems to me a bike is closer to a pedestrian or a skateboarder than a car. Many bicylists 'jay' ride and if you do it properly, it is benign. I can carry my bike up an elevator, ride on sidewalks, ride the wrong way down a street (sometimes this is recommended for safety reasons) and cross at a red when no one is there. I can bring my bike on the train and even hook it to the front of a bus. If you promise never to jay walk, I'll never 'jay' ride! I don't think you can. It is one of the privileges of being non-motorized.
Slosh, the country has been designed for cars. Bicycles will not be adequate given the suburban sprawl encouraged by Republican and Democratic legistlators for years. However, a biker can drive into the city, park in a quiet free neighborhood, and ride the last 5 miles. Or do the same if you work and live only in the suburbs. You can ride to a train instead of driving, etc.
The sprawling suburbs are becoming even less attractive to live in as gasoline continues to rise in price and fall in supply. This is really going to happen no matter what we think - the far out suburbs are going to become less attractive. It is all a matter of the end of the cheap gas fiesta, social habit and infrastructure.
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Elydog, I often think about people...
...who live in those ex-urbs and how one day soon, "For Sale" signs will litter their yards and every third home will have been abandoned, due to commutes that will cost $35 a day. I live in city within walking and biking distance of, well, everything. It's actually within walking and biking distance of everything times 3. I drive a car, but rarely. Mostly it just sits and rusts, as those homes in the distant suburbs soon will...and not in the distant future. Imagine having to pay 20 bucks for a gallon of milk one day soon, once one factors in the cost of the commute.
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Peters point
Webcelt: Wasn't that Peters point. That the bridge in Minneapolis collapsed because the state used its federal transportation dollars on constructing bike paths, light rail and museums (to say nothing of cops sniffing for gays at the airport) rather than fixing the bridge. The bicyclists ride and people died.